Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

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Wait this is even worse. They didn't even build any hardware at all. So just to be clear in less then a year they spent half a million and used other peoples hardware and didn't even have a real gameplay demo.

"It also doesn't sound like you've put any thought into the challenge of simulating realistic swordplay as a generic engine that supports different historically accurate fighting styles, with all the nitty physics, kinematics, and for that matter historical issues to be dealt with."

You are controlling the sword so I'm not really sure what you mean. You need to mocap a bunch of moves from someone fighting in a historic style for the AI and then have the AI randomly jump between a half dozen attack sequences. Before our kickstarter we had a great animator and a bunch of playstation eyes and were able to get good motorcycle fighting animations for a price in the thousands.

I'm sorry but this project was obviously mismanaged. The extreme detail that went into designing the arenas seemed to consume all the resources of the project. Look at the videos of what they had. It is like 100% artistic detail and 0% gameplay.

Sorry, I don't know a lot about these things but it's clear to me now I know more than you do. Its really unkind to speak with presumed expertise about things you're not expert in, and accordingly I'm not interested in talking about this with you any more.

Congratulations on shipping a game. I mean it, that's real. I haven't done that. But stay humble.

Just to be clear. I do think the accelerometer/hardware part would be very difficult. I also think the software side of that would be super hard which is why I'm guessing it would take over a year once you have the hardware. In fact because it is so hard I think the first way I would approach a solution would be with an ensemble machine learning solution leaning on random forests because they are quite fast and Random Forests is the ML algo I have had the most success with in the past, and then try and post process that. If that worked I would probably have users individually generate their forests during a calibration when the game starts.

I have 2 more ideas if that doesn't work well. Though I would probably end up combining all the ideas in another weighted ensemble on top.

The game part of this however is not really that complex and could be done on a regular schedule.

The extreme detail that went into designing the arenas seemed to consume all the resources of the project.

Let me guess, every arena had a bike shed off to one side?

Look at the arenas, they are beautiful. They have cloth objects blowing in the wind. Everything looks like it was custom made from scratch.

"Let me guess, every arena had a bike shed off to one side?"

I'm guessing that was a shot at Road Redemption, and I do wish the art was better, but having a huge art team to make 50+ miles of track from scratch would cost a lot more than 150k, and leave no money for making the actual game. We used a lot of premade assets from turbosquid and the unity asset store. We used EZRoads to make all the tracks except the rooftop levels. Most of the animations we had to mocap/animate ourselves though because there just are not a lot of solid on motorcycle animations available.

The point is that we actually made a game and it is pretty fun(90% user review score), and we did it with a lot less than 500k. Art does not make a video game. That is why I am saying the clang project was mismanaged. The art they made is beautiful, and looks like it is all custom. They could've easily gotten 90% of that from the asset store and it would be worse, but it would also cost less than $1000. Then they have at least 400k left to make the game. The problem they had to solve was difficult, but with 400k they should've been able to make something awesome.

No, not a shot at Road Redemption! I'm not actually familiar with that game. Rather, it was an oblique suggestion that the Clang development process had fallen victim to the pathology of bikeshedding, in which non-technical people "contribute" in the only way they can, which is to say they change the color of the bike shed, over and over again. The point of Clang was not to have really nice arenas.

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